


Strawberries in Winter

by MakaylaJade



Category: Criminal Minds (US TV)
Genre: Angst, Drabble, Drug Addiction, Drug Use, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-03
Updated: 2021-03-03
Packaged: 2021-03-16 00:47:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,161
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29816922
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MakaylaJade/pseuds/MakaylaJade
Summary: “Do you believe in God?” Spencer asked one day while sitting in the clouds.“Why would I?” The angel beside him responded, watching the needle dangle from Spencer’s holy skin.
Relationships: Derek Morgan/Spencer Reid
Comments: 9
Kudos: 43





	Strawberries in Winter

**Author's Note:**

> this is absolutely terrible but I have no regrets... just a short drabble that I wrote instead of sleeping.

“Do you believe in God?” Spencer asked one day while sitting in the clouds.

“Why would I?” The angel beside him responded, watching the needle dangle from Spencer’s holy skin.

Spencer scratched the marks on his arms until they bled. Derek once said the marks looked like strawberries in winter. Blotches of red scattered along the expanse of pale white skin, freckling the inner curve of his arms with no recognizable pattern. Some faded, some bright. Some blossoming into purple bruises while others darkened into sickly browns.

“Those ones are just overripe,” Spencer would say while Derek pressed cold lips to them, murmuring soft, wet apologies over and over again. Spencer didn’t understand. It wasn’t his fault; the needle just hadn’t been sharp enough.

“Why can’t you see what you’re doing to yourself?” Derek asked out of pure frustration, ripping his mouth away from the tender tracks and looking up to Spencer with desperation in his dark eyes, brown with tiny flecks of red. Like chocolate covered strawberries. Spencer would shrug his shoulders, nibble on the inside of his bottom lip, and answer, “I don’t know.”

Because an addict never really did know. The beauty of addiction was the ignorance that came with it. Spencer didn’t know why. Neither did Derek. Tobias hadn’t known either. At first it was all about the escape from reality that dilaudid had offered him, but after a while it turned into dependency which turned into misery.

“I don’t know,” Spencer would murmur when Derek would hold up a bag of recently purchased white powder heroin, an accusatory expression on his face, sadness lingering in his creases around his eyes. He never got angry anymore. It had started that way, with Derek screaming and yelling how he could do such a thing even when he _promised_ to stop, but eventually he learned that raising his voice accomplished nothing; Spencer simply blocked him out.

He had been fired from the BAU a month ago. Hotch said he couldn’t continue having him there, that he was a liability to the team. Spencer had stared at him and wordlessly left the building.

He proceeded to shoot up in his car in the parking garage.

“Why am I like this?” He whispered to himself as he flicked the needle, dispelling the air bubbles to avoid giving himself an air embolism. Air embolism, also known as gas embolism, is a blockage in a blood vessel caused by bubbles of air or other gasses in the circulatory system. Only two to three milliliters of air can cause death. Air embolism has a mortality rate twenty-one percent.

“We aren’t statistics, Spencer,” his father had snapped at him when he was only ten.

And he couldn’t be more right. Spencer had never cared less about statistics in all his life as he slid the needle into one of the remaining veins that hadn’t collapsed yet. It didn’t feel good anymore though, none of it did, but as much as he wanted to stop his body demanded _more, more, more._

“Look, new strawberries ripened today,” Spencer said when Derek got home that evening. All Derek could do was fight back tears, because his baby was slowly killing himself, and even though he was smart enough to realize that, he preferred to turn a blind eye to his own gradual death and infantilize the track marks on his arms.

“I love you, Spencer,” Derek said in response, sitting himself beside Spencer and holding his hands, his eyes glaring at the glowing red wounds.

“I even did it without collapsing a vein,” Spencer said with a small smile, as if that was something to be proud of. Derek would force his own smile and lean in to kiss his lover, because he didn’t know what else to do for a man who couldn’t even see the gravity of the situation.

“I wish you would stop,” Derek said.

“Why would I do that?” Spencer asked, confused, “I can’t live without it.”

“You could try,” Derek murmured, “You did before… _him_.”

“I don’t know how,” Spencer said, watching as Derek’s fingers hesitantly touched one of the fresh strawberries, withdrawing his fingers when a bit of its juice coated his dark skin red.

“I can show you,” Derek said desperately. Spencer wouldn’t respond and would simply grab the nearest book close and bury his nose in it. That night they would make love like things had never changed, like Spencer was still the young, brilliant doctor he had been before heroin grabbed a hold of his throat. He would always be brilliant, but Derek was beginning to question if he was even the same person anymore.

“You’re beautiful,” Derek would breath into his skin, vibrating with his moans of pleasure as their bodies twined together as vines of strawberry plants. Spencer would say something unintelligible and Derek would believe that his addiction was just a stint in his life, that it was something he would overcome.

But after they climaxed together, Spencer would retreat to the bathroom and return later with new strawberries on his arms.

“You need help, Spencer,” Derek said the next morning as he walked in on Spencer preparing his next dosage of heroin in the bathroom, a belt already tied around his harm while he held a lighter underneath of one of their spoons. Derek had probably eaten off of that spoon.

“Tomorrow,” Spencer would just frown, his nose wrinkling in the way that Derek found absolutely adorable in any other situation.

“I want you to get clean,” Derek tried again, approaching his lover with pain marring his handsome face. Spencer looked up at him after slipping the needle in a vein and pushing the plunger, his messy chestnut hair looking thinner than it had just last night. His once sharp eyes were sunken in and cloudy, those bags darker than ever.

“I want strawberries,” he answered through the fog of his high, slowly beginning to slide down the wall, his eyes half lidded already.

“Come on, baby… Let’s get you back to bed,” Derek said softly while hoisting Spencer up by his waist before walking him to their bedroom.

“I love you,” Spencer slurred in his ear, those sweet pink lips pressing against the shell of his ear.

“I love you too, pretty boy,” Derek said as he laid him down in the bed, hating that his lover was doing this to himself. Spencer would tell him he would get clean over and over, crying and begging for Derek not to leave when he threatened to break up with him. But who was he kidding? Derek could never leave Spencer.

And even as those strawberries continued to ripen on Spencer’s snowy white arms, Derek loved him still.

“They look like strawberries,” Derek said again that night.

Spencer would just smile, melancholy hidden in the depths of his eyes. He would look down at his arms before looking back up to Derek.

“They do, don’t they?”

**Author's Note:**

> Follow me on Tumblr! -@makaylajadewrites


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